Adobe PhoneGap 2.0 Ships

Adobe announced the release of PhoneGap 2.0, the latest release of the popular cross-platform, open-source mobile development framework.

PORTLAND, Ore.  Adobes PhoneGap team announced the release of PhoneGap 2.0, the latest release of the open-source mobile development framework.

Tapping into the developer crowd in town for the OReilly Open Source Convention 2012 (OSCON), the PhoneGap team held its second annual PhoneGap Day here on July 20, enabling attendees to meet with the PhoneGap team and connect with other PhoneGap developers from IBM, Facebook and other places.

Adobe PhoneGap enables developers to build cross-platform mobile applications using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. With PhoneGap, developers can re-use their existing Web developer skills and use the PhoneGap API to gain access to native features that arent accessible in mobile browsers.

New features in PhoneGap 2.0 include a Cordova WebView that allows for the integration of PhoneGap, as a view fragment, into a bigger native application. The new release also delivers Command Line Tooling (CLI) for Android, iOS and BlackBerry. CLI tooling brings a standard nomenclature to common tasks across platforms such as project creation, debugging and emulation. Normally, these are different incantations for each platform vendor, making cross-platform development workflow inconsistent and jarring.

PhoneGap 2.0 also features Windows Phone support and enhanced documentation with getting-started guides, plug-ins, migration guides and more to help accelerate the development of mobile applications and make it even easier.

Adobe acquired Nitobi, which developed PhoneGap, in October 2011 and contributed the PhoneGap code to the Apache Software Foundation to form the Apache Cordova project. PhoneGap 2.0 supports the transition to Apache Cordova as it nears graduation from incubator status. The new release also supports Codovajs, which delivers support for unified JavaScript across platforms. In addition, the Web Inspector Remote (Weinre) has been ported to Node.js and the PhoneGap team has made improvements to the technologys iOS app creation capabilities.

In a blog post about PhoneGap 2.0, Shazron Abdullah, a senior computer scientist at Adobe, said:

With the release of Apache Cordova 2.0.0 there are some significant changes for the iOS platform. Weve removed the problematic Xcode templates, and updated our support to iOS 4.2 and greater only. Support for ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) was planned but pushed to a later release (tentatively scheduled for 2.1.0).

PhoneGap 2.0 is all about a vastly improved developer experience, said Brian LeRoux, lead developer for PhoneGap. Our docs are now much more comprehensive, including the long requested commitment to our Plug-in API. Developers are going to have a supported way to use the PhoneGap bridge to build their own browser APIs for native calls.

The PhoneGap community is bigger and stronger than ever with new contributors since last year like Google, Microsoft, RIM and HP, said Andre Charland, director of engineering for PhoneGap at Adobe, in a statement. With a bigger community and additional resources from Adobe were shipping new versions of PhoneGap much faster than a year ago.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.